Tag: free speech

“Why I’m Writing This Anonymously And What That Says About Free Speech In Britain”

Ann Widdecombe’s murder has reopened a question that surfaces from time to time: should politicians with ‘unfashionable’ views get extra protection? The investigation continues, so I won’t comment on that, but the fact that the question is even being asked in response to a 78 year-old woman being killed in her own home tells you something regardless of how the investigation concludes. We have been here before. Jo Cox in 2016. David Amess in 2021. A pattern is forming, whatever the final facts of this particular case turn out to be.

The debate this triggers is usually framed narrowly: what security do MPs need? I want to push it wider: what if politicians are not actually the group most exposed? They have protection officers, party machinery and a public profile that makes an attack on them a national story. I have none of that. Neither does anyone else who simply has an opinion and a job to protect.

I recently listened to Professor David Betz of King’s College London’s Department of War Studies, who argued that Britain may be entering a period of increasing internal conflict in which political violence becomes more likely.

Whether or not one accepts his analysis, it’s difficult to ignore the growing sense that our public discourse has become more hostile and less forgiving.

If expressing political disagreement increasingly carries the risk of intimidation or worse, the answer cannot simply be to provide more security for an ever-expanding list of public figures.

That treats the symptom rather than the disease.

The view from nowhere and a nobody in particular

I consider myself an ordinary person.

Thirty-plus years ago I would have considered myself slightly Left-leaning. I liked to think of myself as one of the good guys.

But somewhere in the last three decades the Overton window slid sideways, and views I’ve quietly held throughout – that mass immigration, legal and illegal, hasn’t obviously benefited the culture I grew up in, that free speech should mean everyone’s speech, including the people I disagree with – are now filed under ‘Right-wing’.

I don’t think I’m unusual. Look at the Brexit vote, which for many people was as much about sovereignty and control over immigration as it was about Brussels. Look at any poll on migration levels. There is a large, ordinary, non-extreme constituency that holds views broadly like mine. And a good number of them, I suspect, keep quiet for the same reason I’m staying anonymous here: weighing up whether speaking out is worth the risk. Silence can easily be mistaken for consensus, and I suspect that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Which raises a question I’ve had to sit with while writing this: am I a coward? Publishing anonymously, after all, is a way of having the argument without paying for it. But I don’t think cowardice is really what’s on display here. A coward stays silent. What I’m doing is closer to something else entirely: deciding that saying this at all matters more than saying it under my own name, while still not being willing to bet my livelihood on it. If that’s cowardice, then I suspect it’s shared by a very large, very quiet number of people who hold perfectly mainstream opinions and have simply done the same calculations that I have. That, in itself, might be the more troubling finding than anything else in this piece.

Fear arrives before the crackdown

This is the part I think gets missed in the security debate. We talk about authoritarianism as something that happens to you: a knock on the door, a lost job, a police caution for a tweet. But before any of that, there’s the version that happens inside your own head. You draft the post and delete it. You bite your tongue at the dinner table. You calculate what a client, a neighbour, or a local WhatsApp group might do with an honest opinion, and you decide it isn’t worth finding out.

That calculation isn’t paranoid. The variables feeding it are laid out in article after article in the Daily Sceptic. Prevent’s own material cites “cultural nationalism”, defined as the belief that Western culture is under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by specific ethnic and cultural groups, as a sub-category of extreme Right-wing ideology. Two-tier policing is underpinned by the College of Policing and National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Anti-Racism Commitment, which states that policing should not be “colour blind”, a principle many officers and members of the public have read as licence to treat people differently according to race. It is perhaps no coincidence that public trust in these institutions has been falling sharply. Gallup found that Britons’ confidence in the courts dropped 12 points in a single year to 57%, while confidence in local police fell 11 points to 64%, the largest year-on-year declines on record for either measure. When the referee looks like it’s picking sides, people stop trusting the game.

Campaigners have logged tens of thousands of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ a year, the great majority of them originating from something someone posted online. And after events like the Southport riots, an entire category of people were branded ‘far-Right thugs’ as a matter of editorial habit. None of this needs to end in a prosecution for it to work. Its function is to make you flinch before you speak, not after. And it’s working: a YouGov poll found that 57% of Britons admit to sometimes holding back their views for fear of a negative reaction, and research published earlier this year found the same pattern setting in even among teenagers, with around one in five saying they hide their political opinions at school to avoid being ‘cancelled’. Self-censorship of this kind isn’t a fringe habit. It’s now closer to a majority experience.

Nothing dramatic has happened to me. Nobody has knocked on my door. I have not been arrested, cautioned or sacked. I have simply chosen, before any of that could happen, to leave my name off this piece. That is precisely the point. Fear doesn’t need to become reality to change behaviour. The anticipation of it is enough.

That’s the self-censorship no one puts a number on, and I think it’s doing more to shrink public debate than any single policy or piece of legislation. Its success isn’t measured by how many people it punishes, but by how many quietly change their behaviour hoping never to be punished at all.

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Meet the Woke Judge Who Sentenced Minnesota Mother Shiloh Hendrix for Speech ‘Crimes’ and Learn About Her Sordid Judicial History

The far-left judge at the center of the alarming verdict in the Shiloh Hendrix case is going viral, and much has come about her judicial past. And it is not pretty.

As The Gateway Pundit’s Cassandra MacDonald reported, a Minnesota jury on Thursday night delivered a split verdict in the disorderly conduct trial of Shiloh Hendrix.

The jury found the 37-year-old mother not guilty on the count related to her words directed at the eight-year-old Somali boy who was stealing from her, but guilty on the count stemming from her comments to the man who filmed and confronted her at a Rochester playground.

Last April, Hendrix was at the park with her toddler when the boy reached into her diaper bag and took an applesauce pouch. She confronted the child and allegedly used the N-word.

A Somali man named Sharmake Beyle Omar, who was not the child’s father, began recording the scene, became extremely confrontational with Hendrix as she was holding her toddler, and continued filming as he demanded and provoked her to repeat the slur.

Following the verdict, Judge Christa M. Daily sentenced Hendrix to a $1,000 fine, 200 hours of community service, supervised probation, and a stayed 90-day jail term.

While racism is horrible and no one should condone racial slurs, punishing someone for uncouth speech is precisely what our Founders fought against. Yet, Hendrix will pay a legal price unless the sentence is overturned.

This outrageous travesty of justice becomes even more glaring when one learns of Judge Daily’s past cases.

Back in January 2023, Daily sentenced a pervert named Thomas Lee Meyer to NO JAIL TIME even though he was convicted of four felony charges of possessing pornographic work.

The victims were reportedly 6 to 8 years old.

Back in August 2024, a 22-year-old Mississippi man named Trashun Haywood was convicted of first and second-degree assault and sentenced to 5 years in prison.

Haywood had repeatedly stabbed a 26-year-old Rochester man with a pocket knife after the two men got into an argument at an apartment complex in northwest Rochester on Christmas Eve of 2021.

The victim suffered stab wounds to his neck, abdomen, and arm. The injuries were so severe that medical personnel at the St. Mary’s Hospital Emergency Department had to perform “life-saving measures.”

But Daily decided to waive 4-1/2 years of the sentence. She said she did so because Haywood eventually admitted to the stabbing and expressed remorse.

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Verdict Reached in Shiloh Hendrix Case After More Than Eight Hours of Deliberation

A Minnesota jury has delivered a split verdict in the disorderly conduct trial of Shiloh Hendrix, finding the 37-year-old mother not guilty on the count related to her words directed at the eight-year-old Somali boy who was stealing from her, but guilty on the count stemming from her comments to the man who filmed and confronted her at a Rochester playground.

The jury reached a verdict just before 10:12 p.m. local time, after over eight hours of deliberations.

The incident took place on April 28, 2025, at Roy Sutherland Playground in Soldiers Field Memorial Park.

Hendrix was at the park with her toddler when the boy reached into her diaper bag and took an applesauce pouch. She confronted the child and allegedly used a racial slur.

A Somali man named Sharmake Beyle Omar, who was not the child’s father, began recording the scene, became extremely confrontational with Hendrix as she was holding her toddler, and continued filming as he demanded and provoked her to repeat the slur.

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Education Secretary Spent £500,000 of Taxpayers’ Money Trying to Scrap University Free Speech Laws

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has run up a bill of more than £500,000 in taxpayers’ money attempting to block free speech protections for university academics. The High Court has ordered the Government to pay the Free Speech Union’s legal costs of £353,748 after it successfully resisted her bid to scrap the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. The Mail has the story:

Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson has spent more than £500,000 of taxpayers’ money trying to water down laws which protect free speech in universities, it was revealed last night.

Ms Phillipson embarked on the legal battle after trying to dilute Tory legislation which put a duty on universities and student unions to actively promote, as well as protect, free speech on campuses, describing it as a “Tory hate speech charter”.

A free speech watchdog allows universities to be fined up to 2% of their income for censoring academics.

The laws came after university staff were hounded out of their jobs for expressing their opinions.

They included Professor Kathleen Stock, who resigned from Sussex University in 2021 after harassment and protests by trans activists, saying she felt pressure to “self-censor” her work.

The philosophy lecturer, who believes single-sex spaces are necessary in places such as prisons and public toilets, was accused by students of making trans people feel “unsafe”.

Ms Phillipson’s move to block the laws was successfully opposed by the Free Speech Union (FSU), run by Tory peer Toby Young.

Now the High Court has ruled that the Government should pay the FSU’s costs of £353,748, which takes the total bill to more than £500,000 when its own legal costs are included.

Within weeks of Labour entering office in July 2024, Ms Phillipson declared that she would revoke the planned introduction of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act, which had been passed in 2023.

Internal documents, disclosed during the litigation, revealed that officials had been instructed before the election to have a statutory instrument ready to pause the Act “on ‘day one’”, and that the Secretary of State did “not wish to implement the Act, at least in full”.

But in January 2025, nine days before the case was due to be heard, Ms Phillipson capitulated and told Parliament that the majority of the Act’s provisions would be enacted after all.

At that point, the FSU offered to withdraw its claim in return for a fixed costs payment of £84,000.

The Government refused, offering instead a “drop hands” settlement under which the FSU, having won in substance, would recover nothing. Since then, the costs have spiralled as expensive KCs wrangled over the details.

Lord Young of Acton, general secretary of the FSU, said: “The significance of this judicial decision is that it confirms our view and the view of our lawyers that we won this case and the Education Secretary lost – costs are awarded to the winners, with the losers having to pay.”

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Video Shows Fort Worth Cop Ticketing a Preacher for ‘Offensive’ Speech at Pride Event

A Fort Worth Police officer ticketed a preacher in late June, claiming the content of his speech was offensive. This week the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division launched an inquiry into the incident to determine if the officer violated the First Amendment.

The widely circulated video of the confrontation shows an officer and a protester during the Trinity Pride Fest on June 27. “If someone is offended by your talking, then we have a problem,” said Officer Sara Stogner.

“That’s a constitutional violation of our rights,” responds David Grisham, a street preacher and retired federal law enforcement officer. The two continue to argue when Stogner asserts, “OK, then I’ll write you the ticket, and we’ll go from there.”

“Wait, you’re going to ticket us for offensive speech?” the cameraman asks incredulously. To which the officer confidently responds, “Yes, absolutely.”

Stogner continues to claim she can ticket the two men for disorderly conduct “if someone complains that your language or what you’re saying is offensive.”  

But that’s not how the First Amendment works, according to legal experts. “The First Amendment does not allow government officials to shut down speech simply on account of it being ‘offensive,'” said Brennan VanderVeen, program counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. “The government can restrict certain types of conduct or restrict noise above a certain volume level,” he continued, but citing someone because people are offended by the content of protected speech is “precisely what the First Amendment does not allow.” 

Grisham was ultimately cited for misuse of a bullhorn during a protest, a citation he argues isn’t supported by the city’s noise ordinance, reports WFAA, an ABC News affiliate. Grisham’s civil rights attorneys announced on July 3 their intent to challenge the citation, arguing Stogner failed to issue a decibel check in accordance with the city’s noise ordinance and Texas code, which presumes an unreasonable noise to be in excess of 85, and instead cited Grisham for “engaging in peaceful and protected speech.” 

In response to growing online backlash, Fort Worth Police Chief Eddie Garcia told WFAA on Monday that his department takes responsibility and is currently instituting department-wide First Amendment training. “We just trained up our command staff again with refresher courses. We’re going to be training our sergeants. We’re going to be training our officers,” said Garcia. “We are not a perfect profession,” he continued, “and officers will make mistakes from time to time.” Garcia did not mention any ways in which Stogner would be held personally accountable or liable. 

“Actively training police officers around First Amendment standards would be a positive step,” said VanderVeen, who added that “government officials being unaware of basic First Amendment standards is a persistent problem.” 

So much so, it seems, the Justice Department is also looking into the incident and has asked the Fort Worth city attorney for information to help the agency determine if an investigation is necessary, reports Fox News. “The Civil Rights Division is committed to ensuring all Americans—regardless of the content or viewpoint of their speech—are protected from unlawful restrictions on expressive activity,” wrote Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon.

The City of Fort Worth, Texas, has 30 days to provide the DOJ with further information.

The Justice Department is right to ensure Grisham’s freedom of speech has not been infringed, and doing so is consistent with the agency’s core mission to protect civil rights. But the move stands out against a backdrop of the agency’s alleged First Amendment violations since President Donald Trump took office, including subpoenaing journalists, coercing social media companies to remove immigration officer tracking apps, and attempting to unmask anonymous online critics. 

But for now, Americans can rest assured that the Justice Department can still do the right thing every once in a while.

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The House Just Voted for KOSA, a Privacy and Free Speech Disaster

The House voted Monday night to build the machinery of online identity checks into federal law, packaging the mandate inside a bundle of kids online safety bills that cleared the chamber 267-117, with 47 members not voting.

It marks the first time any version of the Kids Online Safety Act, known as KOSA, has escaped the lower chamber, and the version that survived carries a structure that pushes platforms to figure out who you are before you can use them.

The legislation, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, or KIDS Act (H.R. 7757), stitches together more than a dozen separate bills, including KOSA, the SCREEN Act, the SAFE BOTs Act, COPPA 2.0, and the SPY Kids Act, plus data broker rules and research initiatives.

House leaders rushed it to the floor under suspension of the rules, a fast-track path requiring a two-thirds majority. Committee Chairman Brett Guthrie and ranking Democrat Frank Pallone, who announced their agreement a week earlier, said the bill would “hold Big Tech accountable” and described months of cross-aisle work toward what Guthrie called a “workable compromise.”

If you’ve been following our updates, you’ll know the accountability positioning hides the actual design. The bill defines “know” or “knows” to mean “to know or should have known,” and that phrase runs through sections covering platforms, AI chatbots, and gaming services.

A company that fails to spot a minor faces legal exposure, which gives every platform a reason to gather more information about everyone who shows up. The text tries to defuse this, stating that nothing in it may be construed “to require the provider of a covered platform to implement an age gating or age verification functionality on the covered platform.”

The reassurance collapses on contact. A platform forbidden from ignoring a user’s age, yet liable the moment it “should have known” someone was a minor, has one move left. It starts checking ages, deploying age-estimation tools, demanding ID, or watching behavior closely enough to guess. The law does not order surveillance outright, it engineers the incentive and lets companies build the rest.

That is the First Amendment problem dressed as a child-safety provision. Verifying age means verifying identity, and identity checks sit between a person and ordinary protected activity, whether that is reading, watching, posting, or speaking. Adult websites would face explicit age-verification requirements under the package, which functionally means every visitor proves who they are before viewing lawful content. Anonymous and pseudonymous speech, the kind the Supreme Court has shielded for decades, gets harder to find the more platforms lean on identity to limit their liability.

The bill tightens how data brokers handle children’s information and updates the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act to widen its reach.

But, to do that, it would require platforms that know a user is a minor to offer controls that limit communications, restrict geolocation sharing, cut compulsive-use features, and let users opt out of personalized recommendation systems, with default settings for minors set to what the bill calls “the most protective level of control with respect to privacy and safety.”

These are strong protections on paper and would be good if they applied evenly to all users, but they all depend on the platform identifying minors first, which loops straight back to the same question of how much data gets pulled from users, adult or not, to sort out who the children are.

The encryption language carries the same gap. The bill says platform requirements may not override encrypted communications and that companies must comply in ways that “do not compromise the integrity of strong encryption.” That could read as a shield until you notice that regulatory pressure to monitor behavior or flag certain users can hollow out encryption without ever formally banning it. Compliance routes around the protection the text claims to offer.

Getting the package across the floor cost the duty of care provision, the piece many child-safety groups and KOSA’s Senate authors consider the heart of the bill. The text now states that nothing in it may be construed to “impose a duty of care on a provider of a covered platform.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a KOSA co-author, wrote that “KOSA without a duty of care isn’t KOSA,” and said last week that the House version is “dead in the Senate.” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), the other co-author, agrees the provision was central. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who chairs the Senate Commerce Committee, told reporters he stays open to negotiating with the House.

That stalemate is the most encouraging thing about this whole fight.

The Senate’s standalone KOSA (S.1748) keeps the duty of care, which would legally require platforms to “exercise reasonable care” to prevent broad categories of harm to minors. On the free speech axis, that is the more dangerous of the two bills, not the safer one. A duty of care over vaguely defined harms compels companies to police or re-engineer recommendation algorithms for lawful, constitutionally protected content, under threat of liability so open-ended that the rational corporate response is to over-remove anything that might draw a lawsuit.

So neither chamber holds the civil-liberties high ground. The Senate bill compels platforms to suppress protected speech, while the House bill conscripts them into identity verification, and a conference committee tasked with reconciling the two could just as easily graft the worst of each onto a single law as split the difference.

The good news for anyone who values either anonymity or free expression is that the two chambers, each representing a different type of civil liberties disaster, do not appear close to agreement.

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California’s $20 Million Attempt To Silence Medical Speech

In a trial set to begin June 24, California’s Attorney General Rob Bonta is asking a court to do something that should alarm every American, regardless of where they stand on abortion: punish nonprofit organizations with ruinous fines for speaking about a lawful medical treatment.

The target is not fraud. These charities offer their services for free.

It is not patient harm. There is no evidence of any patient being harmed.

It is not even illegal conduct. The underlying treatment remains perfectly legal.

The target is speech.

Heartbeat International and Real Options are pro-life nonprofits that provide information and care to women who first take the abortion drug but regret that choice and want to continue their pregnancies. California wants to impose penalties approaching $20 million because these charities have dared to tell women that another option may exist.

Twenty million dollars. That number alone should tell us what this case is really about.

No reasonable observer can believe that bankrupting charities is a proportionate response to truthful and non-misleading statements about a free service designed to help a woman exercise her constitutional right to continue her pregnancy. This is not consumer protection. It is political warfare conducted through the machinery of a government that wishes to silence speech it does not like.

What’s most remarkable is what California cannot prove.

After years of investigation, subpoenas, discovery, and litigation, the attorney general has failed to identify a single woman harmed by APR treatment. Not one. No parade of victims. No evidence of widespread deception. He set up a website practically begging for complaints and still could not muster a single woman claiming she was misled or harmed.

Instead, seven women have publicly shared the stories of how Heartbeat International and Real Options helped them successfully reverse their abortions. Three mothers are slated to testify from the stand about their joy at reversing their unwanted abortions.

Still, the state asks the court to punish the very charities who helped these women continue their wanted pregnancies simply because government lawyers disagree with their viewpoint on the scientific evidence regarding APR.

That is a dangerous precedent.

Scientific disagreement is not fraud. If it were, much of modern medicine would not exist. Medical consensus is not handed down from on high. It evolves. Researchers debate. Physicians challenge prevailing views. Studies are published, criticized, replicated, and revised.

The proper response to disputed science is more debate, more research, and more evidence – not government censorship backed by eight-figure penalties.

Yet that is precisely what California seeks.

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Government’s latest attempt to censor online discourse is grave threat to free speech

The government’s latest censorship Bill C-34 is framed as legislation necessary to protect children. However, it incorporates some of the worst elements of Bill C-63 – the government’s previous “Online Harms Act” that failed to pass – and adds new censorship powers.

The bill proposes regulating social media, online services, and AI chatbots through the creation of a Digital Safety Commission. The Commission will have broad discretionary power to force compliance from online services and compel the removal of any harmful or “hateful” material.

Controversially, the bill weakens the legal definition of hatred presently used by the courts, reducing the requirement from both vilification and detestation to only one of either vilification OR detestation. The result will be increased censorship and a substantial chill on controversial speech.

Importantly, existing laws capture almost all of the conduct outlined in the bill. This includes cyberbullying and non-consensual distribution of intimate images, terroristic or violent threats, hate speech under the Criminal Code, counselling self-harm (Criminal Code s.241), and possession and distribution of CSAM material.

The bill requires online service providers to create an age verification system. Though the bill doesn’t specify age verification methods, it will undoubtedly require service providers to collect biometric and/or behavioural information from both adults and children, engaging privacy rights and raising fears of security breaches. The effect will be to create a database of personal identifying information and to destroy online anonymity 

Digital services that fail to comply with directives of the Digital Safety Commission will face substantial fines based on a percentage of global revenue.

“Laws protecting children from online harm and abuse are vital. However, for the most part, they already exist. All digital services like YouTube, X, Facebook, and TikTok have reporting and takedown policies and mechanisms for illegal or egregiously harmful material. Criminal charges for hateful or threatening posts are already commonplace. Of course, laws should be enacted to address any gaps, but online age verification for children will require age verification for everyone. So while the government frames the bill as a law to protect children, its effect will be to control digital access, comprehensively surveil and punish adults for online dissent. Together with Bill C-22, it establishes an online surveillance architecture that will negatively impact every Canadian’s right to free expression. Parliament should pursue targeted child-protection measures without undermining privacy, anonymity, and freedom of expression.”

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UFC CEO Dana White Says Josh Hokit Calling Michelle Obama a Man Was “Disgusting… F*cking Stupid Sh*t” – Still Defends Free Speech

UFC CEO Dana White was asked on Saturday about Josh Hokit’s Michelle Obama joke in the UFC Freedom 250 Octagon last Sunday, and he defended Hokit’s right to free speech, but condemned the remarks as “disgusting” and “f*cking stupid.”

It can be recalled that after his win against Derrick Lewis, Hokit told Joe Rogan in the Octagon, “Shoutout to Trump for having the balls to put some sh*t like this on,” before praising Jesus Christ.

He went on to drop the savage line, noting that Trump’s not the only one with balls. “And lastly, Michelle Obama is a man!” Hokit shouted. “Am I right, America?!”

Trump was seen smiling afterward, but later removed Josh Hokit’s chain, which had been gifted to him moments earlier.

Dana White previously condemned the statement, saying, “I understand that the Obamas are public figures, but I’m completely against saying nasty and false things about people’s families,” the Gateway Pundit reported. “Everyone knows my position on free speech, but I hate that kind of nonsense,” White added.

White responded again on Saturday night during a UFC Vegas 119 post-fight press conference with similar remarks.

“Look, the Josh Hockett thing was obviously the big story for the mainstream media going out,” the reporter said as White interrupted, “That was disgusting.”

When asked if he regrets having Hokit compete on the White House Freedom 250 card, White said, “Ho, I mean, listen, there’s always going to be people that say things that most of us don’t agree with.”

“I mean, just the time, the place, the, you know, just f*cking, yeah, no,” he continued.

He then praised Obama, telling reporters, “I’ve said many times, listen, I voted for Obama the first time, didn’t vote for him the second time, then, when I was at the inauguration, he was sitting in front of me, and then I saw all this stuff on the internet where people were like, ‘Oh, Dana’s mad-dogging, and Obama. Obama’s the only one that turned around to me, couldn’t have been a nicer guy, and said, Congratulations on all your success and everything that you’ve done, or whatever.”

“I don’t believe in this shit, like all the people that hate Trump: ‘He’s not my president!’ All the people, people that hated Obiden: ‘He’s not my president.’ I got some bad f*cking news for you: If you’re an American, that’s your president, and I respect all presidents, present and past, and you know not everybody does,” he added. Hilariously, he appeared to call Joe Biden “Obiden,” though likely unintentional.

White concluded, “Gotta listen to f*cking stupid sh*t like that sometimes, unfortunately, because I also believe in free speech.”

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We’re At The ‘Free Speech Is Bad Actually’ Stage Of Multiculturalism Now

For years conservatives warned that multiculturalism and free speech are on a collision course. If a society starts treating every culture as equal and beyond criticism, then eventually you have to police speech — and apparently, Europe has decided to do just that.

French influencer Thaïs d’Escufon was allegedly assaulted in 2021 by a North African migrant who — according to d’Escufon — “present[ed] himself as Tunisian.” Two years after the alleged assault, d’Escufon said the main danger to women in France are “Black African and Arab men.” She said Tuesday that she is “facing an unsuspended prison sentence for my comments about the danger posed by immigrant men in France.”

It matters naught whether you agree with her argument (though it should be noted that migrant rape gangs in particular have been victimizing Europeans for years now). What’s important is whether people are allowed to criticize other cultures and immigration policy without potentially being tossed into the slammer.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Europe has punished people for free speech because they condemned the impact of multiculturalism. Eric Zemmour, a candidate for France’s presidential elections in 2022, was found guilty in 2016 for charges related to inciting racial discrimination when he said France had been the victim of an “invasion” of Muslims.

An Austrian woman was convicted in 2018 for calling the prophet Muhammed a pedophile. The woman was convicted for disparaging religion.

In fact, a member of Germany’s Alternative for Germany (AfD) party was convicted for incitement to hatred for using statistics (that were not disputed) to claim Afghan migrants were responsible for a disproportionate amount of sexual violence against women.

It’s an outcome that conservatives have warned about for decades.

In a 2008 column, Pat Buchanan warned: “Canada’s commitment to multiculturalism and the equality of all religions, races and cultures requires the silencing of those who do not believe all races, creed and cultures are equal. The dogmas of the Diverse Society dictate that the cherished rights of the Free Society be sacrificed on the altar of social tranquility.”

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